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Friday, July 22, 2011

Imagine a photograph of you and your fiancé capturing how he would tuck your stray hair behind your ear.

Or a wedding photograph that captures your flowy dress and flowing hair.

I'm not talking about stills nor am I talking about video. I'm talking about moving stills.Pretty much like how Harry Potter's pictures are.

Ready for this?
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Aren't they the coolest animated GIFs ever?!

They are called Cinemagraphs. Here's what it means as posted by diego guevara

"A Cinemagraph is an image that contains within itself a living moment that allows a glimpse of time to be experienced and preserved endlessly.

Visual Graphics Artist Kevin Burg began experimenting with the .gif format in this style in 2009 but it wasn’t until he partnered with photographer Jamie Beck to cover NYFW that Cinemagraphs were born. Marrying original content photography with the desire to communicate more to the viewer birthed the cinemagraph process. Starting in-camera, the artists take a traditional photograph and combine a living moment into the image through the isolated animation of multiple frames. To quote supermodel Coco Rocha “it’s more than a photo but not quite a video".”

The first time I saw these (thanks elaine g. for sharing this on your google+), Harry Potter's daily prophet newspaper popped into mind. Remember those moving photos they have?

I have tried making animated GIFs a loong time ago as an experiment when animaited images became popular. What software I used escapes me at this moment but what I had to do was collect a stack of unrelated cartoon images, put it on a frame (if you have done slideshows, it's pretty much like that), set the speed, "loop" it and when your satisfied save it as GIF. But the moving GIFs above are, I could imagine, more tedious and manual labor intensive. Just look at the fluid movement of the hair and dress!

Before I read the whole blog (you can find it by clicking the "source" below) I was assuming that they must have a very fast camera doing multiple burst of shots. When I say burst I'm talking about multiple shots per second. Then create moving GIFs using a moving GIF creator software and voila. Unfortunately, it's NOT that simple. You're really better off just reading the blog where I got these pix from. It would explain how they do those moving GIFs. Plus there are more awesome animated GIFs there!

Anyway, how is this related to wedding stuff? Like I mentioned on my first paragraph, wouldn't it be neat to have a moving GIF on your wedsite where every element in the photo is "still" except for your groom's hand slowly reaching his hand to hold your hand in a group photo? Or an animated GIF capturing that first kiss as husband and wife? Or how about an engagement photo that looks like this: